President Obama is seeking advice on the war in Afghanistan from Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian on the Vietnam War. BO has doubled the size of our force there and given Gen. Stanley McChrystal the task of reviewing our effort there and creating a plan for victory. The special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, made contact with Karnow for his advice. Historians have questioned the legitamacy of the Hamid Karzai government, and the recent elections there, and the preception of graft and corruption of that government. There is a comparison to an election in 1967 in Vietnam to lend popular support for a military regime there by "an imposed presidential election". It failed then. Karnow's book is Vietnam: A History. Karnow was asked what we learned from the Vietnam War and he replied; "We leaned that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Obama and everybody else wants to be there. I don't".
(Source: "Vietnam scholar's advice sought" taken from McClathchy Newspapers. The Record on 8/7/09).
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